#10 - Neenja, Episode 4
by Hayk Manukyan
AN INTERVIEW WITH HAYK MANUKYAN
Neenja, an animated series about discovering hidden powers, is perhaps a bit autobiographical. 
But Hayk Manukyan uncovered his hidden talents at a very young age, unlike the hero of Neenja, Harut, a balding cab driver. In real life, the co-star of Neenja, Sah, is an actual animator who helped bring the project to life. The two worked together at the Hollywood-based studio Six Point Harness, where Neenja was set into motion as an original production.
Let’s find out how Hayk brought his vision to life, and what he has in store for his own personal episodic arc.
AARON SIMPSON: How does an episode of Neenja come together?
HAYK MANUKYAN: I start by visualizing the story as a whole, then I find a cut-off point in the story which can stand on it’s own. For example in part 1, I end it after Sah tells Harut he is the chosen one. Before the episode ends, we see a hint of Harut’s power which hopefully leaves viewers wanting to see what happens next. After I know my cut off point, I move onto storyboarding, which I do in Flash. My storyboards are usually posed out to the point of almost looking like rough animation. Once I start animating I take the poses in the storyboards and work with them to get the final result.
AARON: How did Six Point Harness get involved in the project?
HAYK: I was working at Six Point and overheard they were interested in new, original properties. But I was pretty burned out from the Neenja part 1 production. I had been juggling my full-time job and late night animating. So I asked Brendan Burch, CEO of Six Point, if they’d be interested in helping finish Neenja. Brendan was excited about the whole idea and so I brought Neenja to Six Point.
The follwing 3 months were probably the greatest 3 months I’ve experienced in the animation industry. I got paid full time to work on my own project, plus I had Angelo Vilar (an amazing artist at Six Point) doing the backgrounds and storyboarding.
AARON: Is the lead character Harut based on someone you know?
HAYK: Harut is actually a combination of people in my family, people I’ve gone to school with, and mostly me.
AARON: Tell us which Los Angeles-based Flash animator co-stars in your series?
HAYK: I always like basing my characters on real people and at the time when I was designing Harut’s trainer, I decided to base it on Saharat Tantivaranyoo, a friend of mine at Six Point. Everything from the way he looks, talks, and acts made it into that character, also called Sah.
AARON: What type of recognition has the series received so far?
HAYK: Part 1 of Neenja won a first place award on Newgrounds and it was also featured here on Coldhardflash.com. The feedback I got from people was also pretty good.
AARON: Neenja is about a man discovering his talents and harnessing them. How did you learn to harness your animation skills?
HAYK: My uncle in Armenia was an animator, and I guess it passed down to me. My parents realized I was into drawing at a very young age so they pushed me into it even more. By the time I discovered animation in America at age 11, I already had years of drawing experience. I also had a little thing called ignorance which played a big part. I felt, at age 14, I was ready for Disney, and I mailed them photos of my artwork expecting to get in. Six months later Disney sent me a packet of sample portfolios and examples of what they are looking for. It made me realize how much more I had to learn in order to reach the level of Disney animators. Luckily they included a list of recommended schools, and so I started taking a lot of classes on life drawing, reading books on animation, online interviews of great animators and so on. After high school I was hired at Cornerstone Animation Inc and the rest I learned on the job.
AARON: There are 2 episodes yet to go in the Neenja series, right?
HAYK: Both episodes 5 and 6 are written and ready to be completed. Part 5 is halfway there, but because I don’t have the schedule I had back when I was at Six Point, the process is taking much longer.
AARON: You’re also planning a feature film, correct?
HAYK: It’s a long term goal I’d like to reach, but it’s nothing to expect anytime soon. I still have a lot to learn before I tackle that one full on. Plus I still need to finnish Neenja.
This Dublin-based team has also produced a number of independent shorts, none better than Carte de Visite, which was directed by 
PAUL O’FLANAGAN: A carte de visite, translated as ‘visiting card’, is a memento one could buy back in the mid-nineteenth century after visiting a stage show, circus or other performance. It was a little memory of your visit that people would collect in albums.
AARON: What was the timeline of the film’s production?
PAUL: In producing this short, we went to great lengths to hide the digital nature of this film. To achieve this, we had to employ an array of computer programs. The backgrounds were made using Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop. These additional programs were used to create the textures within the character animation along with Adobe Illustrator for the pencil-like lines of the characters.
The exhibition inspired me in a weird way. I left the circus a bit disappointed. It all felt very superficial and I had hoped it would go a bit deeper into the characters lives and their feelings towards this environment they’d found themselves in. So, I decided to write a story myself.
PAUL: By the time we’d get to an episode of Foster’s, most of the direction is done through the storyboards from Cartoon Network in California. We’d do a wee bit of troubleshooting when needed for composition, continuity or occasionally re-boarding some camera angles. It was a great experience and if it weren’t for working on that show we would have had to take on a steep learning curve for Carte de Visite. It was my first effort writing a story but my years on Foster’s helped me in realising what type of shots would work and which set-ups wouldn’t.
AARON: Was there a milestone in your career that helped you make the leap from animator to director?
PAUL: When we applied for a short film grant, we sent in two submissions. The application for each film was made up of concept art, a screenplay and a few written pieces explaining why and how we wanted to make the film. But perhaps the most important elements in our application were the budget and the producer attached to the production. If the Film board wasn’t happy with these, I doubt our application would have gone much further. Next, we got a phone call saying that one of our applications had been short-listed and we needed to go for an interview to talk about the project in more depth. We went, and they seemed happy and confident with us. We got the grant and then got to work!
His violent and sexually explicit project 
I had been trying to come up with a character to lead a story for 2 years after I finished 
MILTON: I like things that incorporate cool creatures, so all the Star Wars films have inspired me visually. Early in my life, John McTiernan’s 1987 Predator film and Aliens together got me hooked on sci-fi.
AARON: Was there a particular animated property you relied on for inspiration for shot selection, FX and animation technique?
AARON: So how has it effected your work?
MILTON: We’re about 50% done. We had to put it on hold for a while. Work and life have delayed things.
MILTON: Can’t say for sure right now. All I know is I had to make it and my friends made it possible. I know something good will come of it, I just don’t know what yet. I’m just glad a lot of people have enjoyed our hard work. But in a perfect world, I’d like to make toys of the Akumi characters and continue the series.
In the video, the country-dwelling band members eventually topple the mechanized execubots, but during the production, the team found a way for technology to work in harmony with their organic process. Alongside his team at 
BRADLEY CAYFORD: The Turnaround video was an incredible experience, to say the least, as it always is working with other amazing artists in the world. There are plenty of incredible videos out there and I’m happy to have created something with others that enjoyed the process and the outcome in the end. 
BRADLEY: The video has led to some opportunities and has more so opened my eyes to the greater importance of doing this type of art. I became more in tune with the world around me after we finished this video. It opened my eyes to new experiences within art, thusly the world has opened its eyes to me. There have been small projects that have come and gone, but the best opportunities to emerge are the confidence in my own work to push it even further. For instance, in creating artwork for my daughter and family as well as exploring my boundaries in all aspects of art and animation. I can’t wait to see what happens in the future as surely it will be a topsy-turvy story by the end of it. 
BRADLEY: I suppose those comments on Wacoms and Cintiqs were a little premature, but I still don’t really use them as much as many others do. Artists can create life out of anything and whatever anyone chooses to make is up to them. As for me, I just use whatever I have to make my art, my art. I have a Wacom tablet which I use from time-to-time in production with Photoshop to paint my backgrounds for shows. Then sometimes I use it for show pitches and of course if I want to draw a quick rough on the fly it’s much more efficient to use the Wacom. But I still use the mouse quite a bit for those quick turnarounds. 
The medium, canvas and palette are there to help you attain your goal in the end. So however anyone chooses to do it, then that’s their choice. I admire anyone that has the gump to do what they feel is right before doing what they feel they are being pushed to do.
Those were all fun projects and I’m hoping that there will be more in the near future. There are also, of course, some projects that I can’t discuss yet, but I’ve been doing concept work that has allowed me to visit some inner city schools and do some real research. 
It featured a plucky ninja working his way through a series of outlandish training exercises. The comedy was sharp and the style was undeniably unique, with elaborate cross-hatching, a boiling line and the signature brown-paper backdrop.
CHF conducted a 
MCLEODS: The little Ninja is Fuggy Fuggy and his master is called Shakoom. Their own names are the only words that each character speaks.
MCLEODS: We did very rough storyboards but no animatics. We’ve posted a few of the storyboards 
MYLES: I went to a few Jiu Jitsu classes at Uni but quickly realised that on the balance of probability I was more likely to be badly beaten in a Jiu Jitsu lesson than by a mugger which rather defeated the whole point of it.
We’re also putting together some pitches for children’s series, hoping to ride the wave of the success from our input into 
MCLEODS: We’ve both been in bands since early teens so music has always been part of what we’ve done. In the beginning we did all our own music partly because we couldn’t afford anyone else. But we also just love going into the studio and putting together a song. It’s just another creative process where you take an idea and carry it on through until you have a finished polished product. The beauty of music compared to animation is that the process is much quicker and that can help sometimes, especially when you’re involved in a long project and you need that creative closure on something.
MYLES: Writing for computer games is a totally different process. In the work I’ve done so far, I’ve come in when the production company had already developed the storyline and concept. My role has been to write the cut-scenes between levels to make the story work, but mainly it’s writing thousands of lines of dialogue that can be used in the different levels of the game. Last year I worked on a SpongeBob SquarePants game which was great fun because I love that show. It was great to get the game for my Wii and hear Tom Kenny and the rest of the cast reading my lines.
Phillips’ has a veritable BrackenWoodstock going on every day at 
Phillips’ Brackenwood series is now part of a feature film effort that you can read more about below. For further reading, you can also cast your gaze at his 
AARON: Is there a person in your life who inspired Bitey, the “star” of Waterlollies?
ADAM: I’d have to go with the obvious and say Bitey because I really have a lot of fun moving him about. I particularly enjoy experimenting with his poses and facial expressions. He is unique in many ways, for example it’s always a great challenge to portray emotion and thought with such a limited set of facial features. Also with his satyr legs, something like crawling or sitting down is a real exercise in creativity that I love to play with.
ADAM: At storyboard stage I rough out the key animation poses and try to nail the timing as early as possible, so I usually have the sequence playing back in my head before I start animation. As I work on each scene I stay true to the storyboard but I’m constantly fine-tuning the timing and watching the playback to see how it reads. Sometimes, even after the entire movie is completely finished, I’ll watch the whole thing through and occasionally decide that I can tighten up a sequence by removing some frames or smooth out some action by adding more drawings.
ADAM: Absolutely. Well, maybe not so much on a scene-by-scene basis, but the way of the FX animator is to take photographs, video footage and personal experience to build a mental reference library of how stuff works. This is how most animators think anyway - they are keen observers of real life, because only with an intimate knowledge of the real world can you make your drawings and animation appear to be alive.
AARON: What part of the animation process do you find most tedious?
ADAM: No, never. I can write a story, but I’m learning now that a screenplay is a different animal. To date, most of the shorts on my site have been fairly simple ’scenario’ plot pieces, where a story doesn’t really exist… it’s just a string of simple events leading up to the end joke. Writing the Brackenwood feature with 
ADAM: We’re still talking structure right now. My original naive plan was to tell the history of Brackenwood from start to finish but it was delicately pointed out that this would equate to about 15 hours of screen time. So we’ve started to break it down by identifying the vital plot elements that drive the story. This will eventually be the framework for our screenplay which we should see come in between 90-120 minutes.
This isn’t to say I won’t be doing any more 10 minute epics. I’m feeling very confident with 
MICHEL GAGNE: I’ve always been interested in silhouette drawings and they’ve been popping up in my work for years. I even made a book using silhouettes called, 
When I received financing to do the shorts, I was dealing with a very short schedule, so again, Flash seemed like a better option than hand-drawing the whole thing. In short, it was a matter of economy and time constraint that made Flash the prime candidate.
I looked at the films and then called or emailed the animator with precise notes about timing and animation revisions. They did a second pass, and I gave more notes, then a third and so on. We worked back and forth until the short looked perfect to my eye. The animators sometime came up with incredible solutions to my difficult animation demands.
He came to my house, we discussed the project and he was very enthused by it. For the following two weeks with put together a small animation demo to go along with the proposal. Once that was done, we both flew to LA and pitched the project to various studios. About 5 months later, I got a green light from 
